Divided by Design
Mind Control Series Part IV
In April 1967, a high school history teacher in Palo Alto, California faced a question he couldn’t answer.
Ron Jones was teaching his students about Nazi Germany. They couldn't understand it. How could ordinary Germans have allowed the Holocaust? How could normal people become monsters?
Jones decided to show them rather than tell them.
He walked into class and wrote on the board: “Strength Through Discipline.” He told students they must sit at attention. They must stand to ask or answer questions. They must speak in three words or less. They must address him as “Mr. Jones.”
The next day, he added: “Strength Through Community.” He created a salute, a curved hand raised toward the shoulder. Students were to use it in the hallways. He told them they were part of something special.
Day three: “Strength Through Action.” He told them to recruit others. He issued membership cards.
Jones thought the experiment would last one day.
One year later on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a third-grade teacher in Riceville, Iowa walked into her all-white classroom. Her students were confused. They had made King their “Hero of the Month” just weeks earlier. Now he was dead, and they wanted to know why.
Jane Elliott decided to teach a lesson.
She divided the class by eye color. She told the brown-eyed children they were smarter, cleaner, and more civilized than those with blue eyes. She gave them extra privileges: first in line for lunch, extra time at recess, second helpings. The blue-eyed children were made to wear fabric collars around their necks so they could be identified from a distance. They were sent to the back of the room. They were told not to play with the brown-eyed children.
The children were eight years old. They had known each other their whole lives.
Around the same time, in a psychology laboratory in the United Kingdom, researcher Henri Tajfel was asking a simpler question: What is the minimum condition necessary for humans to discriminate against each other?
He brought schoolboys into his lab and divided them into groups based on nothing meaningful. Their stated preference for paintings by Klee versus Kandinsky. In some iterations, he divided them by coin flip. The boys never met their group members. They didn't know who else was in their group. There was no competition, no history, no conflict, no stakes.
Tajfel then gave them a task: allocate money to anonymous members of their own group versus the other group. They could not award money to themselves.
A high school in liberal California. A third-grade classroom in rural Iowa. A psychology lab in England.
Three different settings. Three different age groups. One question:
What happens when you draw a line between people and call one side “us” and the other side “them”?
